I have been working at PA Consulting Group full-time (More than 5 years)

Pros

Good expenses policyFair amount of autonomyNo "up or out" cultureGood bonusMost people friendly and helpful

Cons

Excessive travel - most work outside London but all social and community focus is mid-week and London focussed. Waste of time.Stagnant and uninspiring pipeline of workMost Partners useless - bonus mechanisms encourage self-preservation over the best interests of the firmProhibitively expensive - you'll take home circa 10% of what you bill with Partners taking a large chunk of the restNot innovative at all. They really advertise themselves as this but its utter nonsense.Limited account support beyond pressure to sell more work.Lots of internal work - you'll lose lots of weekends and evenings to pointless internal work. If you do it, no one cares - but if you don't do it, youll get criticised and financially penalised at bonus time.Strategy changes every year - Partners just squabble about CEO driven changes for a year before anything actually happens - and by then, another strategy gets wheeled out.

Advice to Management

Remove Partners from the internal roles of driving forward PA's strategy. They have a vested financial interest in the status quo rather than embracing potentially disruptive change. Get them out of the office and on the road winning new work. They need to find new clients and not just squeeze the ones they've got. This just produces an uninteresting portfolio of work with ever decreasing opportunities for the consultants on the ground.

I have been working at PA Consulting Group full-time (More than 5 years)

Pros

Exciting projects shaping future technologies, products and business models. Entrepreneurial and network based organisation. Brilliant people, often world class. The global technology centre is truly unique - we really create unique inventions shaping entire industries, develop and build world first devices and machines.

Cons

Innovation culture concentrated in one area of the business, suboptimal travel policy for international flights, relatively low salaries, relatively unknown brand. Uncertainty for future developments and strategy.

Advice to Management

Truly integrate technology and innovation cross all services and sectors. This is a key differentiator which could be developed and used more across the company. Reduce the amount and increase the quality of the internal change initiatives. Clarify future strategy and direction.

Current Employee - Managing Consultant in Cambridge, East of England, England

Current Employee - Managing Consultant in Cambridge, East of England, England

Recommends

Positive Outlook

No opinion of CEO

I have been working at PA Consulting Group full-time (Less than a year)

Pros

The people here are generally legitimate experts in their fields. At most levels the employees need to work collaboratively, so there is a collegial atmosphere. Also, there is a fair degree of autonomy, so it's possible to migrate to projects that one might find interesting.

Cons

The "partner-as-business-unit" model creates a number of perverse incentives. Unlike law firms where billable hours are the target, here it's project profitability. As a result, there can be pressure not to bill hours, but to do the work anyway.

Advice to Management

Rethink the metrics that are used to judge people to capture the true costs of a project (and of selling a project!). Also, recognise that current incentives do not encourage employees to stretch to new (risky) business areas or to large projects for which extensive time may be spent on bids.

- People are great, you learn a lot from people who come from different backgrounds and how you can work together to succeed.

- You learn the meaning of true patience when you have to jump through many hoops just go get one thing.

- Some opportunities for training.

- Great way to expose yourself to different sectors if you want to learn more about setting up your career path.

Cons

- Not developer friendly, the IT systems there are dinosaur age systems. IT services treat you like a complete idiot and you are locked down to a system that you have to fight to get approval to do something. No administrator rights for a developer.

- When a lot of people were leaving, management just mishandled the whole situation.

- No exit interview, HR decided to send over a "survey monkey" form instead of taking initiative to organise a 1 on 1 interview.

- You are given mediocre hardware, as well as when requesting a license for software, you have to send several emails just so management will say yes. (Even though we pride ourselves on innovation)

- Mostly public sector jobs, if you get stuck in a certain public sector job, you're probably going to stay there until you hand in your resignation.

- To get promoted you need to brown nose a lot and show off as possible, doing a good job and going over and beyond doesn't just cut it.

- Company tends to play catch up instead of trying to lead.

Advice to Management

-Consider treating your employees as people and not the same way you treat a laptop.

-In order to promote people look for the defining factors that make a person good, not just use a general framework.

-When an employee asks for something, you just give it to them, not ask a million questions and try make their life hard.

Autonomy of work, broad, interesting projects with real impact to our clients. Every employee has a really interesting back story, they are of the highest caliber and genuinely excellent people to work with

Cons

too mechanical in performance reviews, only based on mathematical calculation of utilisaiton with business development (sales), Thought Leadership, soft skills only playing a minuscule proportion of performance. You are higher rewarded for doing a long, tedious low profit job over smaller, more profitable pieces of work until you are at MC rank

Advice to Management

Push back to the new owners over the mechanical calculation of grading. Partners should have freedom to issue their genuine feedback. Targeting utilization is old hat and isn't working!

Company Updates

Would your organisation survive without #innovation? http://glassdoor.com/slink.htm?key=vQc28 We don't think so, and neither does Andy Palmer (CEO, Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd) Watch why #InnovationMatters to him and the team at Aston.